From the Director

Edward Albee’s now classic drama portrays a society where human beings are trapped by their illusions and claustrophobic relations. The only escape is booze, lots of booze.

Written in 1961, the year the Berlin Wall was erected, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a Cold War drama whose teeth remain sharp in a new American era. Albee constructs his characters in a warzone and proposes the extinction of their civilisation. They end the play having stripped each other raw. Eviscerated by the party games and awake to each others’ strangeness, Nick and Honey begin their journey home. Shorn of certainty, afraid and fragile, Martha clings to George as the light of a new day floods their cave.

George and Martha are the 20th century’s most formidable and ferocious opponents. They are addicted to each other and to getting at each other. Their 'danse macarbe' is a display of pure aggression, a burlesque doubling act, a psychodrama played to the hilt. Trapped in a hall of mirrors with their little guests as audience, they dare each other to seek a hidden heart of love behind Oedipal masks, beyond disgust, beyond excess, beyond illusion.

To get at each other, to get at the marrow, they enact a ritual with the coffee table as altar, alcohol as sacrament, the guests as acolytes, and the murder of their son as sacrifice. What is displaced by this exorcism? Some cancers, certainly. A violent lack behind the lie, the American Dream, perhaps? A nightmare lurking inside familial structures. Daddy’s red eyes and big dick. An ego jerking on strings, a no-thing that Jaques Lacan called “an old puppet... a baroque doll... a trophy made of limbs.” Castration anxiety. Phallic panic. Hysteria. Narcissistic frenzy. A phantasmagoria. A diagram of desires. A demented menagerie of capitalist neuroses. All these. Endless reflections. Messy, hungry, desperate needs.

The fun and games are not, however, confined to the stage. Honey and Nick, those promising, young neo-cons are our representatives onstage, and like them, we are not allowed to remain voyeurs. Theatre is a ritual enacted in public. A safe form of sacrifice offered by the pleasures of watching others at play; offered by shared laughter, shared silence, and the communion of catharsis. We stare fascinated at conflicts we would naturally avoid and we see strange versions of ourselves. We glimpse our blindspots. We come near the insane laughter and total silence which George describes echoing behind all language.

Albee’s critique of reality is total. The lie of society is exposed and everyone is culpable. There is no salvation, not even in closure. Watching George and Martha’s games, we might want to cry out like Nick, “Jesus Christ, I think I understand this”, but are disallowed. They run fault lines through language, expose secrets, shatter illusions, and produce irrealities.

We are left alone in public, reflected. We are united in shared, bare life, and the ritual solidarity of theatre. Like George and Martha, we lack a future, yet taste, for a moment, grace.

Benedict Andrews